


Going Underground

by vtn



Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Album)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Killjoys, Disabled Character, Gen, Genderqueer Character, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-27
Updated: 2011-12-27
Packaged: 2017-10-28 06:29:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/304754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vtn/pseuds/vtn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In an outpost in the desert, far from the urban dystopia of Battery City, lives a bored and frustrated young upstart they call Pony Boy.  Until the man in the wheelchair shows up and everything changes.  This is how it all began.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Going Underground

The sun burns the dust bright orange and the blue sky is so clear that if you lean over and squint you can just barely see the tops of buildings glittering on the horizon. And not a hint of wind.

The one they call Pony Boy eyes himself in his cracked mirror, looks suspiciously, wants to make sure nothing's changed. Then he picks up the black band that lies on the side of the sink and ties it around his eyes. His lips twist into a smile.

\---

Tyro and Rini and Yellow Ledbetter are waiting for him out on the range. Rini's fiddling with the sight on her rifle and Tyro is trying to line up cans over on the far wall when he's not distracted looking at Rini in her short short skirt. Yellow claps Pony on the back before wandering over to his post and firing off a round aimlessly into the sky. Pony watches the bullets fall in a gorgeous tight arc.

He shoots into the blue and hits a bird that breaks with a clatter.

"Oh hell, you can do better than that," says Tyro. Tyro is leaning on the fence looking over at Pony and shooting behind his back. Rini looks a little nervous when Tyro tosses his gun from his right hand to his left and fires again. His shot misses the cans entirely and ricochets off the wall they're stacked on. "Sonuvabitch," he mutters.

Pony bounces a little on his rollerskates and then gives himself a gentle push, gliding along the fence nice and easily. The others get out of the way, and Pony shuts his eyes and knocks off every other can that's still standing up.

"Tell me honestly," says Rini, "Were you even looking?" Pony grins at her.

"Nope."

They set up a new row of cans and bottles, and they shoot until the sun gets low in the sky, when they break for some drinks and sandwiches from Tommy at the convenience store. He gives them the usual discount – Yellow thinks it's 'cause he's scared they'd just steal it all otherwise.

"Damn," says Rini when they're back out in the sun, lying on her back in her bra, "that old perv in the wheelchair's still sitting out there at Gioelli's." She gestures toward the high back terrace of the town's resident Italian place.

"And he can see all the way to heaven," says Tyro appreciatively, glancing at Rini's chest.

"Nah," Rini says, placing her hands over her small breasts, "Not much to see here. Besides, I'm pretty sure he's looking at Pony's ass."

"He is not looking at my ass," says Pony, squinting, trying to make out the outline of the man at Gioelli's.

"He's so looking at your ass," Rini says. "You just can't see through that Zorro mask of yours. You are so paranoid, you know. It just makes you look like a damn fool."

"Fuck off," Pony mutters. His fingers sweep over the Leatherman in his pocket, as a reflex. "You watch your mouth."

"Hey now," Yellow says, pushing past Tyro to break them up, "Let's behave like responsible adults here."

"Mmm," says Rini, "Responsible adults, that's us." She balls up the foil from her sandwich and tosses it at Tyro's head.

Yellow's mouth forms words but Pony never gets to hear what he said.

Everything explodes into blinding light and head-splitting noise. Pony sees red, hears a high ringing sound that he doesn't realize is all in his head until a moment later. He rolls behind a rock and clutches his gun to his chest. He hears shouting and shots being fired, the revving of an engine and the squealing of tires. Gloved hands grasp at his gun and he beats them away. The air is so full of dust that he can't see anything anymore, so he just flips his rifle around backwards and beats forward with the butt. He hears cracking. He stands up, his head still pounding and ringing, but now he can see figures through the dust. He aims and fires and hits his mark.

And then something heavy comes in contact with the back of his head. He feels dizzy and tired, and the ground seems soft. He lies down and shuts his eyes while the world whirls around him. He pushes away hands that try to pull back the fabric over his face. From somewhere far away he hears a few dull thumps, like someone knocking on a door. And then for a while he hears nothing at all.

\---

Pony opens his eyes in a room full of wires and displays. There's the constant sound of a high buzzing in the air. Everything burns. He shuts his eyes again.

\---

"He's waking up," says a voice somewhere in Pony's periphery. Male, probably early 30s by Pony's estimate. It still hurts to open his eyes even a little, so he doesn't.

"Thanks. I'll deal with him now," comes the gruff voice of an older man. Pony feels himself being lifted up and moved—rolled?—along a straight path, then there's a sudden sharp turn and the air feels cooler.

Suddenly, Pony becomes acutely aware of the fact that his band is gone. Which can only mean one thing. His heavy hand fumbles in his pocket for his Leatherman and finds it, making his heart swell with relief. Unseen, he flips the knife blade out and with a quick jerk, aims for the face of the man he knows is standing over him.

A hand catches his arm.

Pony carefully opens his eyes. Across the blade he's looking into the face of a man with steely eyes and a rough beard, his skin scarred and leathery. Tan skin, black hair, average weight, maybe 40, maybe slightly younger and just saw too much for his age.

"You're gonna die," says Pony, everything suddenly all too lucid. "My face is gonna be the last thing you see. You bastard. You fuckin'—you fucks did in my mom and dad, my brother, my sister, my sister's baby, you're fuckin' gonna die under this knife and it's for them that I'm gonna kill you. I wanna make you suffer first though. I—"

"I've suffered enough, my friend," the man says with a bitter laugh. He drops Pony's arm. He moves away from Pony's side with an odd gliding motion. It's almost like the way Pony moves when he's in his skates—wait, the man in the wheelchair!

"Hey," says Pony, "I saw you watching me and my friends at the range, so don't play dumb with me."

"Watching you, yes," the man mutters, "Looking after you might be a better way to put it."

"Look, I don't know who you are." Pony tries to sit up. Stars wink in front of his eyes. "You attacked my friends. You kidnapped me. You took my blindfold and you're holding me here, in this room...." The room, Pony notices as he looks around, is full of music. Mainly vinyl records, but some cassettes and CDs too. Computer terminals are running verbose, spewing data out onto their screens. A clutch of microphones dangles from the ceiling. A sign reads 'ON AIR'; it is dimmed. The walls are covered in posters, but underneath that they're bright orange, orange like a lifejacket, orange like a traffic cone. "I don't know where the hell I am, and I..."

" _We_ didn't attack your friends," says the man. "But listen to me. I'm being terribly rude. My name—the only one you'll ever need to know me by—is Doctor DeathDefying," he says, extending a hand sheathed in a biker's glove. "You're here in the Love Shack. It's a little old place where we can get together."

Pony sits up slowly and hesitantly takes the Doctor's hand. He notices now that his own hand is bruised and bleeding.

"They call me Pony Boy," he says as the Doctor shakes his hand surprisingly gently.

"Hmm," the Doctor intones. He releases Pony's hand. "It's funny. I thought you were a girl, when I first saw you." Pony's breath catches in his throat.

"Hmph," he manages.

"I only mention it to ask, while we're in the privacy of the station... are you?"

"I..." Pony doesn't know what to say. A wave of heat rises to the top of his forehead. "If you're just asking that 'cause you wanna see my cock, that shit is fucked up." The Doctor smiles and shakes his head.

"I only want to be fully squared away here. Do we understand each other?"

"Where am I?" Pony demands, backpedaling away from the subject.

"Home," says the Doctor.

"My home is in Outpost 71," says Pony. "It's not much of a home but it's mine."

"Outpost 71 is sunk," says the Doctor. He doesn't change his expression. "Wiped off the map. Check, mate, game, and match."

"You can't mean—but—Yellow and Tyro and Rini—did you bring them here too?" Pony's heart pounds in his head.

"Your friends are in the pipeline," the Doctor says.

"Where's the pipeline?"

"The pipeline to the mainline to a higher plane of existence," the Doctor says. "Business class on the Nirvana express."

"My friends are dead," says Pony, dully. "You're saying my friends are dead."

"Aren't we all?" the Doctor asks.

"Fucking tell me," Pony gasps, fumbling for his knife again. "Tell me straight."

"Yes," says the Doctor, breathing out. "Welcome to Battery City, kid. You're one of us now. I can see it in your eyes. You're asking who's us? We're the survivors. We're the terror on the airwaves. We're the last stand. We're the last stop."

"Stop babbling," says Pony. "If Rini and Tyro and Yellow and..." Pony swallows. "And everyone...if everyone's gone? If they dusted Outpost 71? Then...then I've got to fight back."

"Well you're in the right place, sunshine."

\---

Pony gets to know the Doctor pretty well over the next few days. He gets his own room, a tiny stinking chamber with concrete walls and floors and a Japanese movie poster above his bed. It makes him feel content, knowing nothing can touch him there, no stray EM waves or whispers.

The only person he sees other than the Doctor is the station's actual doctor, a heavyset woman named Juniper with pale skin and red lips to match her fiery hair. Dressed in fatigues, she's all business, tending to Pony's wounds and taking samples of his blood. Part of him is scared she just wants to sequence his genome, but he calms himself by recalling that the government wouldn't go this far undercover, they'd think it beneath them. She brings him real-people food, too: hushpuppies and lo mein and rich warm apple pie and thick greasy potato wedges wrapped in newsprint.

Talking to the Doctor is an experience unlike any other, an overwhelming information overload even after he spent years listening to Yellow talk about guns and only as of recently understands—understood—the better half of it. Everything DeathDefying says is steeped in metaphors and allusions Pony doesn't recognize. He mutters about hi-fi angels and rambles about digital diamond dogs.

"Tell me who you are," the Doctor says one day, which makes Pony sit up straight.

"I told you," says Pony helplessly. "The name's Pony Boy."

"I know all that," says the Doctor, leaning on the arms of his chair and gazing at Pony intently. "I want to know who you _are_. What's your sun sign? What's your essence? What color is your aura? What color is your parachute? Are you groovy? A scientist? Black hat, white hat, grey hat? Do you know how to fly?"

"I'm just a homesteader's kid," Pony says. "From the middle of nowhere. And goin' nowhere."

"Dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return," the Doctor agrees. "But do you know where that dust comes from? It comes from the stars. It comes from everywhere, everyone. You're made out of stardust and sunflower seeds. Shakespeare's dust and Sitting Bull's and Siouxsie's and everyone in between. Let's not talk about dust." I wasn't talking about dust, Pony wants to say, but doesn't. "Who are _you_? What are your coordinates?" He pauses, looking contemplative. "Everyone has a story. What's your story?"

"I was born in Zone 3," says Pony. "Back when I don't remember, my mom and dad got worried about the way things were going and they took me and my brother and sister out to Outpost 71 with some other homesteaders. My parents got sick and died when I was just a kid. Everybody said they caught a virus, I think it's pretty obvious what really happened. My brother and sister got killed when they went out with a group of people to find supplies. My nephew was still nursing back then so my sister couldn't leave him. I think they killed him just to make a point. Did it slow. Stole his heart out."

"That's sick," says the Doctor, his lip twitching, the first sign of emotion he's shown.

"No shit, dude," says Pony. He exhales. It's something no one could fake. _Our side_. "Anyway I've just been trying to stay out of trouble since then. Looks like I failed." He feels like this should be harder for him to say, but maybe he just hasn't really accepted the fact that the other homestead kids are just _gone_. It was like that with Mom and Dad and Jenny and Rob. It only started hurting later, when you started to think about them and miss them and slowly realize they were never coming back.

"And you're a sharp shot with your eyes shut, how did that come to be?"

"Too much spare time," says Pony.

"Right," says the Doctor like he doesn't really believe. "You realize you are a precious jewel, now, don't you?" Pony quirks an eyebrow. "I mean, what you can do—we need you."

"Who needs me?" Pony asks. "Who's we?" The Doctor smiles and wheels himself out of the room.

\---

Pony is feeling brave when Juniper comes in to replace his bandages that evening. "What do you know about the Doctor?" he asks her. She laughs and blushes a little.

"DeathDefying? He's pretty private," Juniper says with a shrug. She looks at the gauze she has unwrapped from Pony's arm and raises her eyebrows. She continues as she wads up the bandages and discards them, replaces them with fresh white fabric. "He's really obsessed with three things: his radio show, computers, and cars. You know how he's in the chair—he lost the use of his legs, back before I knew him, but it's not something he was born with. He's an idealist with a major Peter Pan complex. And he takes care of us all."

"How many of you—of us—are there?" Pony asks.

"A good number. Probably twenty or so at any given time. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Some people are just passing through on their way to some other safe place, some other less safe place, or...well, the place everyone goes to."

"You all seem to have a pretty blasé attitude toward death."

"You kind of have to, when you're a freedom fighter. Death is just a way of life."

"Yeah," Pony muses, touching his arm where it's been freshly bandaged, sweeping his hand over his waist, the back of his head. There's hardly any pain now at all. "I can see how you might say that."

\---

The Doctor deposits a large brown bag on Pony's bed when he enters the next day, a little after dinner. Pony can walk around his room just fine now, and he picks up the bag and gently empties it onto the bed. He gasps. A pair of electric red drainpipe jeans spill out. A soft white T-shirt with a diving V-neck, the words 'kill your television' splattered across the front in inky black. A gold chain with charms: music notes, a horse, a death's-head. A black lace scarf.

And at the very bottom of the bag, a pair of white roller skates, washed clean of the stains of dust and blood.

"What...what is all this for?" Pony asks, turning his eyes down to look bashfully at DeathDefying. "You didn't have to do this, you know."

"I can leave the room while you change." Pony nods, speechless, and the Doctor wheels his laborious way out the door. Pony strips off his hospital gown and squeezes into the jeans that fit over his legs like a second skin, creasing sharply behind his knees, bunching at his ankles. He runs a hand along his chest and stomach, realizing his ribs aren't poking out like they used to: he's better fed here in the Love Shack (whatever that is) than he ever was back at 71. Then he pulls the shirt over his head.

Huh.

He leans out the door and peers down a dark hall.

"Doctor?" he calls. "You can come back in."

"Yes, of course," comes the Doctor's voice from somewhere in the darkness. "I'm just finding a few more things. Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens." The light falls on him as he wheels back into the room one-handed, the other hand clutching a long mirror. Pony helps him set it up, and then he looks at himself.

Again he gasps. Heat rises into his cheeks and his ears. The person he sees in the mirror is all seductive hips and long eyelashes, smooth skin and delicate hands. The gangly homestead kid is gone, beneath a neckline that almost gives him _cleavage_ and bright red denim that squeezes his trim thighs.

"It's me," Pony breathes, the words coming out faster than he can stop them. "It's finally me."

"Please, sit down," the Doctor says. Behind him in the mirror, his face in shadow, the Doctor is a dark and commanding presence, his glossy hair curling at the ends to outline his handsome jawline. Pony sits cross-legged and spellbound in front of the Doctor's wheelchair. DeathDefying produces a brush and runs it gently through Pony's tangled dark hair, starting at the bottom and working out the knots slowly. It's grown long—Pony hasn't cut it in a while, and now it makes him look even more _beautiful_ , falling soft down the back of his neck.

"You know, I was like you once," the Doctor says wistfully. "A pretty show pony with ribbons in my hair." Now the Doctor has abandoned his brush and is just stroking Pony's hair, gloved fingers brushing the tops of Pony's ears. "But that's all far away now." He lays his hand atop Pony's head, almost like a benediction. "Now I think it is time, my Show Pony."

"Time...?"

"Time—to meet the family."

\---

It will take Pony weeks to memorize the labyrinthine passages of the Love Shack. It isn't just a basement, it's a network of basements, levels that go so low you could probably feel the heat from the center of the earth at the bottom chambers. When he finally gets to the place they call the War Room, his head is a tangle of left and right turns, of stairs and hallways and doorways.

In the War Room, the family is waiting.

There are at least the twenty that Juniper estimated. Men and women, even children. Everyone is wearing flashy colors and sports wild hair, sometimes tattoos and piercings, ostentatious jewelry, ripped jeans. A number of them have scars. They're every race and color, and some of the murmurings Pony hears are thickly accented. Guess it's true what they say, he thinks, about a common enemy.

"My children, my lost boys and golden girls," says the Doctor, nudging Pony up onto a large wooden platform that serves as a sort of stage or soapbox. The Doctor himself rolls up a ramp at the side. Pony is suddenly nervous, bile rising in his throat. And then two of the men in the crowd nudge each other and smile, looking Pony up and down, and he breaks into a wild grin. "Please let me have the pleasure of introducing to you the Love Shack's most illustrious new resident. My friends, this is the beautiful, the inimitable, the inexplicable: Show Pony. And Show Pony, these are the fabulous Killjoys."

\---

The rest of the night is all a blur. Pony gets drunk on moonshine and snorts crushed pills off the kitchen table, dances to the loudest music he's ever heard in his life—they call it punk rock, and to him it's euphoria. Falls asleep on the floor, wakes up in the middle of the night curled up with bodies he can't even assign names to, clothes on; they're just curled together for warmth because the night is cold when you're alone.

\---

Doctor DeathDefying does indeed have a radio show. WKIL "one-oh-nine in the sky". A pirate station, slipping below the radar.

The way the Love Shack functions as a broadcast station is like this:

The brazen gang is situated (at the current time) right under the noses of the government and its lackeys, right in the information district of Battery City.

(Show Pony has never been to the city before the fabulous Killjoys rescued him and ferried him to the Love Shack.)

There in the information district is the Nova Systems tower. They're a big software megacorporation, traded on the stock exchange at more than Pony's life a share. ("Closed source," says the Doctor. "Don't bother.") Hundreds of floors of offices.

Under the Nova Systems tower there are tunnels that go deep into the ground. They don't come up into the tower so the Doctor figures no one at Nova even knows they're down there.

Atop the Nova Systems tower there is a silver spire that splits the sky and pierces the sun.

And up that spire, unbeknownst to the world at large, radio waves shoot like bullets, exploding in the sky, the shrapnel finding its way to anyone with a receiver tuned at just the right frequency.

Pony wonders sometimes if the Doctor is playing coded messages to freedom fighters everywhere, but the most likely explanation is that he really does just love rock'n'roll. He specializes in gems mined from the sands of the twentieth century, sounds Pony has never heard before but gets addicted to worse than any drug. He comes up shaking in the morning for his fix, crawling to the broadcast room before he's even had his breakfast.

And sometimes in the quiet of the morning the Doctor puts a hand on Pony's knee and Pony wonders what it means, is content to wonder for now.

\---

The Doctor gives Show Pony a helmet to wear the first time they go out on a run. Party Poison drives with the top down, and Pony sits in the back with his head sheathed in white synthetic fiber, a visor drawn down over his eyes, restoring his usual anonymity. The sun is coming up A-bomb red on the horizon; the sky is the color of danger and of promise.

AMS  
October 21-22, 2010

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. I am a casual fan of MCR at best. I wrote this story after watching the Na Na Na video and poking around the Twitter accounts a little bit, with very limited knowledge of the background and the established fandom conventions. So this backstory is really my own take and it's an unconventional version.
> 
> 1a. The thing people will probably take the most issue with is the fact that they're in Battery City, so I'll explain: this is meant to take place long before the Danger Days storyline occurs, and I intended that the government's grip on Battery City would tighten over time. The Killjoys being rousted out of their Nova Systems hideaway and being forced to live in the desert was, in my mind, something that made them even more incensed and start taking their missions a lot more seriously.
> 
> 1b. Also this story is over a year old, so if anything has been released more recently that completely contradicts it, well...whoops. *shrug*
> 
> 2\. My take on Show Pony is that he isn't really a boy, and he isn't really a girl. I have him using male pronouns mainly because it's what he's used to and it doesn't bother him.
> 
> 3\. Juniper, Yellow, Tyro, and Rini are original characters.


End file.
